Bishop Hill has a post quoting Ben Goldacre’s “appeal to authority”:
“you have only two choices: you can either learn to interpret data yourself and come to your own informed conclusions; or you decide who to trust”
That statement misses a crucial point.
It should be extended as:
“you have only two choices: you can either learn to interpret data yourself and come to your own informed conclusions; or you decide who to trust” AS LONG AS THEY APPEAR TRUSTWORTHY.
Because the Authority has to regain its authority every single time.
Otherwise it’s just a sell-out of the brain, sheepishly sticking eg to the opinion of the Royal Society no matter how stupid that opinion might become in the future.
The choice to learn to interpret data yourself is unavailable to most people.
I remember trying to explain to a programmer where I worked why privatizing Social Security can not work. The reserves would be greater than the value of the United States. It is not a difficult argument. She just could not get it until she came across a statement by the Concord Coalition that said privatizing Social Security was impossible.
Just this morning on C-Span the policy wonk Dick Morris warned that government bureaucrats were going to deny benefits and that everything in medicine should be given to everybody. A couple of statements later he said that people should not be punished, taxed, or incented to pay for the benefits. The tea party crowd to whom he was talking were not bothered by the conflict in logic.
Just for balance, Democrats wanted to ban bicycles from children because brass is used in bicycle tire air valves. And Senator Harry Reid flushed $15 billion or so on Yucca Mountain just because it is in the same state as Steve Wynn’s casinos.
It is a false dichotomy. For example, you can choose to not trust anyone.